Thursday, January 17, 2008

The journey to build our family through international adoption is turning out to be much longer than we anticipated. It is January, 2008 and the CCAA has not made any matches and referrals for families whose dossiers were submitted in 2006 yet!

We started the paperchase in March, 2006 and finally got our dossier sent to China in late December, 2006. They aren't kidding when the paperwork process was dubbed "paperchase!" We could have had our dossier submitted much sooner, but the Atlanta office of the Department of "Homeland Security" sat on our documents for 4 months (but who's counting?). That alone was an interesting experience -- we were encouraged to not make waves because "who knows?" what will happen to our documents if a staffer gets annoyed. Fortunately, the office has made some changes and I hear they are processing documents in the promised timely fashion now.

The CCAA assigned our dossier a "Log In Date" (LID) of 2/1/2007.It is from that date that the clock starts ticking, so to speak.When we submitted our dossier, the average wait time was about 14-16 months -- which seemed like an eternity then! Unfortunately, there are fewer matches made with international adoptive families than ever before, so the wait has become much longer.

We are now expecting to wait for 24 months (that would put us at March, 2009) for our referral. I could have given birth to an elephant before this is all over!

I added a tracker at the bottom of this blog so you can follow along with our wait.

We are all eager for our family to expand, yet we trust that when the time is right, we will be matched with the children who are meant to be Peeds!

Marina Needs Us -- Donor Registry Drive Volunteers

This Facebook page was created by friends to announce and coordinate volunteers to work at Marrow Donor Registry Drives across the US. We work with Be the Match and DKMS Delete Blood Cancer to get as many healthy people to join the registry as possible.